Financial advisors provide advice to clients regarding a large variety of financial transactions. Such transactions, e.g., stock, bond, or mutual fund purchases or sales, are often placed with financial institutions, either by the financial advisor on behalf of clients, or directly by the clients. Financial advisors typically use an account management application (either operating locally or hosted on a network) to analyze the holdings of their clients. To obtain the clients' transactional data, a financial advisor will periodically download client account data from individual databases of the various financial institutions at which their clients have accounts. This data is stored in a separate database used by the advisor's account management application. During the downloading process, problems with the data almost always arise, especially with regard to conflicts between or among various data elements in the source and destination databases.
For example, data may have been improperly coded by the financial institution, e.g., an incorrect client number or stock symbol. Other data supplied by the financial institution such as account balances may not match existing data in the advisor's database. Data may be supplied that cannot be interpreted. Finally, problems may arise when loading data that is dependent on other data that has been rejected by the advisor's database.
Conventional solutions can detect and report some simple syntactic and semantic errors, such as missing data fields, incorrect data types, account not found, and transaction type not found. However, conventional solutions are incapable of intelligently correcting or otherwise providing assistance to the advisor to resolve such errors. The financial advisor or other user is assumed to know how to manually repair the errors, and is expected iteratively and interactively reload the affected data files. This is necessarily time-consuming, and may require the advisor to acquire specialized skills of data correction, that lie outside the advisor's core competence of financial analysis. Some systems provide an online help mechanism that includes screens that explain how to use a particular feature of the application, but do not provide any software mechanism within the context of such help information to effect the desired changes to the data.